We have three months until we get a new Prime Minister but I’m not sure we can wait so long for a new Chancellor. George Osborne’s silence was bad, but his re-emergence is even worse – as his pitiful article in today’s Wall Street Journal shows. It is written as if some awful tragedy had befallen Britain, and that this visibly battered country is appealing for American support. His job is to sell Britain, its people and the historic decision they have just made, rather than disparage it. Osborne’s article is here. Below is what he should have written.
On 23 July, the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union – perhaps the single most momentous decision of my political lifetime. It was not a decision I campaigned for; a move of such a scale brings risks. For me, those risks were too large. But the people who voted decided that the opportunities were greater. And even those of us who voted to Remain have to concede that Britain has seldom been better-placed to make this decision. Britain has voted to retrieve the sovereignty that we have ceded over the years to Brussels.
We know that turbulence awaits us. During the campaign, I pretty much spoke about nothing except the trouble that would confront a country that voted – against the world’s expectations – to live under its own laws and work with Europe on its own terms. But the truth is that Britain has seldom been in a better position to take such a decision. I struggled to argue that the UK depends on the EU for its prosperity: we have been creating more jobs than the rest of Europe put together. Our employment levels are at a record high. The day after the referendum, government borrowing cost fell below 1 per cent for the first time in history. Yes, the falling currency will make shopping more expensive. But with inflation at 0.2 per cent and a target of 2.5 per cent, we can afford to take that inflation.
If our Remain campaign made a mistake, it was to place too much emphasis on the economic turbulence. That was priced in to the ‘Brexit’ vote. When the Founding Fathers of the US thought about their future, they didn’t consider what GDP would be in 1800. They went for liberty. So in many ways, Americans should understand Brexit better than most.
Thanks to the changes that my government had made – and the hard-won economic stability that David Cameron and I have spent the last decade arguing for – the people of Britain felt confident enough to make this historic decision. We did so from a position of strength; indeed, Brexit can be seen as a result of this economic security. And if my country has just become 12 per cent cheaper for Americans, due to the currency fluctuations, can I suggest that there has never been a better time to visit or invest?
Britain is a country on the turn, and a country anxious to start the next chapter in its history. This was not a vote for a Little England – this was a vote against a Little Europe. Throughout the debate, my opponents on Vote Leave were explicit: a country like Britain, linked by trade and habit to every nation in the world, has no need of protectionism. We want to trade with our natural partners, yet were prohibited from doing so by an EU that seemed to see its role as building a wall around a continent. That is not, and never has been, the British way.
When Barack Obama came to visit Britain, he kindly sought to help my side of the debate by saying that Britain would be ‘at the back of the queue’ in any trade talks with the United States. While well-intentioned, his manoeuvre did not really help because it underlines a basic point: we have no trade deal with the US as things stand. You are our largest single customer, and we are your largest single inward investor. And yet we could not strike a trade deal because all such arrangements have had to be agreed through the EU – which is the equivalent of trying to do a deal with 27 different countries at once. Such talks are undergoing, but look set to fail.
This is just the start of it. Italy has threatened to veto an EU trade deal with Australia over a row about tinned tomatoes. A trade deal with Canada was held up after a row about a Romanian visa. The price of not having such deals increases with every month, and a globally-minded country like Britain decided that the constraints placed upon us by EU membership were a price not worth paying. So Brexit was not the cry of nativism. It was the cry of globalism.
We have voted against the bureaucracy of the European Union; we have not voted against Europe. We have not deserted our allies. We have not lost our appetite for immigrants: we hope to have tens of thousands more arriving every year. But in common with every other country in the world, we would like to have control over the process.
During the referendum campaign, David Cameron was frequently asked about the moral case for our current system of discriminating against Americans and other non-Europeans. The answer is that there is none. The EU obliges us to fast-track all kinds of other countries through passport control while Americans wait in a long snaking queue at our airports. Americans currently have to earn £35,000 a year – or be deported, and I, for one, am looking forward to the moment where we can abolish this stipulation. At a time when global demographic changes are leading to a far-right backlash across Europe, I am proud to be Chancellor of a country where there is simply no equivalent. Our only racist party, the BNP, saw its votes fall by 99 per cent at the last general election. Just as America was famed as the melting pot of the world, Britain can now claim to be the melting pot of Europe. Do not believe what you may hear about a nation turning in on itself. We have just seen a nation that voted to lift its sights to more distant horizons, to make its own alliances on its own terms – and to get closer to our friends and allies in the United States.
Being at the back of the queue is better than not being in the queue. As Chancellor of the United Kingdom I can say that Britain is now standing, with its hand outstretched, hoping that our great countries – that have achieved so much together in the past – can achieve even more in the future.
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